Read more: the best of Barbados

After launching the hotels and bringing up a son, Lynne and Mike - who also still lives on Barbados - separated several years ago.

And with Villa Nova, funded by a multi-zero'd divorce settlement, she's been able to do everything her own way.

Celebrity guests, for instance, have not been courted this time around.

'Because they're a nightmare! The B-listers are OK, often very nice, but the top echelons can be monsters.

'And I'm sorry to say the women are invariably worse than the men.

'Demanding, complaining, neurotic and obsessed with what they will and will not eat.

'Take Raquel Welch. She'd only have a certain number of ounces of chicken. Grilled, not fried. Aaargh!

'A big star also has a very unsettling effect on the other guests. They don't want to go up and talk to them in case they're being obtrusive, and they resent the staff being taken up with them.

'They like to see them in the restaurant for lunch, though.'

The utter self-confidence is, she thinks, thanks mostly to her father - a miner whose life was changed when he joined the RAF and who, after the War, became a door-to-door salesman.

'A lovely man,' she smiles. 'So adventurous. He took my mum and my older sister and I away on a foreign holiday every year - on the train to the south of France, on the coach to Lido di Jesolo.

'And I was his little princess. A bit of a horror, too. I remember on that trip to Lido di Jesolo, reporting my sister to my father: "Dad, she's not looking at the Alps! Make her wake up!" And singing and dancing up and down the coach the whole journey!

'But I always knew I could do whatever I wanted to do - and that's because he told me I could.'

She gives one of her unladylike cackles and starts the engine. Time for tea on the veranda 'at the hotel discerning people choose', she says, straightfaced. So we know where that is, then.

Travel facts

Elegant Resorts has seven nights at Villa Nova (bed & breakfast) from £1,395 per person including return flights with British Airways and private car transfers.